Don’t buy followers! Grow them!

At the end of my last post I promised another one on why buying twitter users is perhaps the worst decision you can do when it comes to social media. It’s not number one, (I don’t know what number 1 is, maybe ask Britney Spears) but its up there in the top 10. This is an issue which regularly infuriates me so I warn you beforehand, this might sound a little like a rant at times, but I promise to snap out of it as soon as possible.

You know what they call a leader with no followers? Just a guy taking a walk.

Yeah, the old saying is very true, if you want to influence people you need them to follow you, quite literally on twitter. But as I said in my last post, they should follow you for the right reasons, because they like your content, because you have a good relationship with them and they actually like you as a person. They shouldn’t follow you because they might get paid, or because you promised you’d follow them back. There is actually a very used twitter hashtag called ‘#TEAMFOLLOWBACK’. And yes, it’s all in capitals, don’t ask me why. These guys literally troll twitter and follow everyone, they don’t care if your running a dog charity or selling used sex toys, they will follow you, simply for a follow back. I have a few of these guys following me, and every other day I get mentioned in their tweets as the guy who doesn’t follow them and they promptly proceed to unfollow me. Good riddance.

Don’t be one of those guys. Please. If you are, I sincerely hope you snap out of it, and I’ll give you reasons why. Remember high school? Yeah, twitter isn’t high school. It’s not about popularity, it’s about catering to your followers and helping them. People like me value a persons twitter with the content they provide, I look at their last 10-15 tweets when I go on their profile, if I like them and they genuinely interest me then I follow them. Very rarely, and I emphasize the very, do I look at a persons followers, mostly only when I go on a celebrities profile, just to see how many other people care what he/she has to say. Now I’m not saying you should do what I do, I value quality, not quantity, but you should try and stop caring so much about other peoples and mainly your followers. I don’t even know precisely how many I have at this time, honestly.

If you buy followers I can swear to you that they will be the worst followers ever. They will require you to follow them which means your feed will be filled with their tweets, which I can pretty much guarantee you will have little to no interest in. So why do it? Just for the numbers? That’s dumb. It is, I’m not going to sugar coat it, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard. You earned that money (if not you, someone else) with hard work, don’t throw it down the drain. Spend some time tweeting quality content and you will get followers who genuinely care, people you can become friends with, people who won’t unfollow you because of some petty reason.

So there you have it, instead of writing a big list on why you shouldn’t do it, I gave you one reason. Why? Because if you have half a brain that’s all you will need.